Posted
by
Zonk
on Wednesday March 29, 2006 @04:25PM
from the too-busy-playing-oblivion-to-read-it dept.

With the release of the fourth chapter in the Elder Scrolls saga last week, UGO has put together a piece looking back on the long and successful history of Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series. From the article: "Some RPGs take the restricted world premise so far that they are practically on rails. Thankfully, the team at Bethesda Softworks decided back in 1994 that that wasn't the way things would be for their series The Elder Scrolls. Now at its fourth installment, we have decided it was about time to take a look back at the series that broke the mold on what an RPG should be and that gave players the most important ability of all - the ability to choose how to play the game. So ready your horse, grab your finest set of gauntlets, and prepare to embark on a journey through the history of the series that brought the amazing world of Tamirel to life, and don't be afraid to slay an orc or two in the process."

Morrowind was my first TES game. And I loved it. The greatest kick I got out of it wasn't even the game - it was screwing with the system and the dev kit, building my own house, doing crazy superhero-like things in game with my character, fucking with the physics and the game's backend - and, of course, playing through the storyline. It was really cool. The best part of the whole thing was the total freedom. And while I didn't follow this example, I remember seeing a quote from one of the Morrowind devs that summed up how I actually played the game (I must have gone through the main story line half a dozen times with different characters). He said something like "If you want to spend $50 on a game and create yourself an invincible sword and beat it in a few hours, that's your perrogative."

You only need more than ten hours if you can't fool them into thinking the half-hour of actual content you created is new and different the second time they see it! Go WoW!

Step 1: Create a mechanism by which gamers can be coerced into voluntarily repeating a thirty-minute span of playtime over and over, with no additional content development required!Step 2: ???Step 3: PROFIT!

It's not really quantity vs quality, more like open ended vs storyline on rails.yeah a few of the dungeons and quests available are pretty run of the mill, but some are pretty interesting with good story and the kind of choices that make you want to try all the options. Oblivion (sofar) tilts more towards the interesting quests than Morrowind, which in turn was better than Daggerfall (with lots of very generic "go get $rand_item from $rand dongeon" and such).
The point of the g

I played the last version on Xbox my own special way: serial killer. Forget the story line, that takes too much reading.

Basically I went around killing everyone. Sneak into their homes and get them from behind! YEAH!

This was easist with an archer character as you could perch yourself somewhere and fire away with impunity. I guess this was a bit of a bug. I would take 10 minutes to kill a guard. The only downside is that guards would respawn, spoiling my ability to be the last man standing in the game!

The "Dark Brotherhood" is a blatantly racist jab, a disgusting attempt by Bethesda to oppress the black man. I never thought it of such a remarkable game development firm, but when I saw an entire segment of the game dedicated to an organization of "dark brothers" who run around "getting people from behind", I was apalled.The sheer fact that this game allows you to play a Redguard "Dark Brother" named "T.V. Swipes" is a crushing blow to the respectable African American in contemporary society.

For Arena and DaggerFall, try DosBox [sourceforge.net]. I'm pretty sure DosBox is Bethesda's preferred method of running Arena, and since DaggerFall is also a DOS game I'd start there rather than trying to get it to run under WINE (does WINE emulate Windows' DOS emulation?).

Patch up Morrowind and you shouldn't run into too many crashes (I've run into a few after multi-hour-long play sessions), but make sure you save often. No idea how it runs on Linux, so I'll take your word for it. Good luck getting Oblivion to run unde

The installer.exe from their site says that it's a win32 program and can't be run in dos if you try to use it in dosbox. It's been a while since I tried, I can't remember if Cedega could run the installer but not the game itself, or if it wouldn't even run the installer.If it's the former, then one might be able to make some kind of Cedega/dosbox combo work. I don't think I ever tried that.

And yeah, my saving habit was cultivated under Morrowind. It's carried over; I save like crazy in every game I play

The installer.exe from their site says that it's a win32 program and can't be run in dos if you try to use it in dosbox. It's been a while since I tried, I can't remember if Cedega could run the installer but not the game itself, or if it wouldn't even run the installer.

The installer executable from Bethesda is a simple self-extracting archive in RAR format. Any decompression tool that understands RAR should be able to read it (such as the shareware RAR for Linux [rarlab.com]). It should also run just fine under

Huh, I didn't even think about running it through unrar or unzip or anything like that.I just checked the DosBox website; it says that Arena runs just fine. Some of the user comments make it sound like you've gotta have a monster machine to be able to emulate a fast enough box to run the game smoothly, or else be willing to have a high frameskip setting.

As for PC vs. X-box for Morrowind: man, I don't know if I could have played through the game a second time without some improved face models, which could o

I just checked the DosBox website; it says that Arena runs just fine. Some of the user comments make it sound like you've gotta have a monster machine to be able to emulate a fast enough box to run the game smoothly, or else be willing to have a high frameskip setting.

I can believe that. DosBox is about up to 1994-96 level of speed for games. Daggerfall pretty much maxes it out, while Arena should be playable (maybe adjust the in-game detail slider a bit). I went ahead and set up Arena last night on

For example, I choose to use OpenGL as DosBox's display mode. If I was running linux on this laptop, I wouldn't be able to get OpenGL accelerated and would suffer for that even though the game itself doesn't use 3D acceleration.

Actually, I haven't even tried. It's an ATI x300 mobile chipset, which I guess might work with ATI's opengl drivers. I should've said more along the lines of, "OpenGL acceleration would be less-performant than on Windows," given that ATI's drivers generally perform worse on Linux than on Windows (compared to nVidia's, which perform the same or better). That's a problem with ATI and not Linux, and was only meant to be an example of how DosBox

Actually, I haven't even tried. It's an ATI x300 mobile chipset, which I guess might work with ATI's opengl drivers. I should've said more along the lines of, "OpenGL acceleration would be less-performant than on Windows," given that ATI's drivers generally perform worse on Linux than on Windows (compared to nVidia's, which perform the same or better).

Yeah, I've used 'em, and the ATI drivers are pretty much crap. They're way, way better than nothing at all, but they still suck. They're about as bad as ATI

You were close, it caught a 'Troll' mod. Troll, of course, means exactly as I stated: Unpopular Amongst the Unpopular. It's the nature of this site, populated as it is by traditional 'losers,' as it were, to have the people band together into a sort of groupthink where any opinion that doesn't meet mass approval be suppressed. This is the basic problem with human interaction. It's a nonstop feedback loop that merely reinforces previously held ideas. After all, in no way could someone not like playing D

"D&D is boring, though, and frankly, it can really only be played with people I don't wanna be around"

You didn't say "I find D&D boring because I'm rather anti-social and refuse to try new things." That would've been alright. You could've said "I have no one to play with, so my interest in D&D has wained." That would've garnered our support and sympathy. Saying something like those would have shown your statement was 'opinion' and thus cannot be di

Is the Elder Scrolls story an epic saga that continues through all the sequels, or is each game completely stand-alone? Obviously the "same world" is used, unlike, say, the Final Fantasy series, but do the storylines of the previous "episodes" affect the new games?

Each game stands by itself, but every installment has an impact on the following games (mostly in books, sometimes in quests that are somewhat related to what happened in the past).

Oblivion, for example, has a lot of references to Daggerfall's storyline. But having played daggerfall isn't a requirement, because the Daggerfall events have become part of Tamriel's history. In a word, when you play oblivion you might realize that some books are talking about what happened to you while you were playing Daggerfall, Arena or Morrowind, but if you haven't played them then it's still part of the world's history, it's just slightly personal. You don't feel like you lost anything though, because you don't actually know that it was part of a game's previous plotline.

You couldn't say that it's an epic saga, because you don't impersonate twice the same characters, and your characters aren't related, but the world is truly the same and coherent, and the what happened in the previous games stays part of the current game's history.

The Lore is part of what makes the Elder Scrolls so amazing. These are the only games in which people try to collect and read every single book just for the sake of knowing Tamriel's Lore.

Sadly, while Morrowind and so far Oblivion have been filled with goodness (I'm working on an Oblivion quest wiki in my meager spare time), Daggerfall was - blech. Crashes, needed patches, the whole "randomizing" dungeons just made it too hard to go anywhere and know what the hell was going on - and the map system was this 3d thing of horror. Towns were full of people, most of whom were just empty bodies, and there was hardly any way of keeping track of quests.

Luckily, they learned from their mistakes - the only thing I need in Oblivion to make it "near perfect" is the ability to write notes on the map and in the journal myself, like "to do: check out that little island at location X".

> Sadly, while Morrowind and so far Oblivion have been filled with goodness (I'm working on an Oblivion quest wiki in my meager spare time), Daggerfall was - blech. Crashes, needed patches, the whole "randomizing" dungeons just made it too hard to go anywhere and know what the hell was going on - and the map system was this 3d thing of horror. Towns were full of people, most of whom were just empty bodies, and there was hardly any way of keeping track of quests.

Daggerfall was just way too ambitious, it was unplayable due to bugs and the random dungeons. But that ambition is what makes the TES series great, it just can't necessarily work every time.
Daggerfall was even _more_ ambitious than Morrowind or Oblivion, it tested the limits of what you could do with an open ended RPG and made the last two in the series possible.

You feel like a moron because you didn't think to shift click on the map? Shift clicking doesn't do anything, else, so why would you have thought to try it? It's not your fault the interface is so poorly designed.

Now all it needs is a way to resize the map, zoom in and out on the map, have the map on the game screen, allow you to drag items out of your inventory without closing the menu, get to your inventory from anywhere with a single button, drop things without having to close and re-open the menu several times because you happen to be standing close to something, have tool-tips or some easy way to figure out what on-screen status icons stand for, not say 'Loading Area...' every six seconds in huge-ass text, have

Haggling is way better than in Morrowind where you had to haggle over every single item. Here you set "haggle level" per shopkeeper.

You don't have to haggle for every item in Morrowind. You can select a ton of different items to buy and sell, and then haggle over the entire deal in one go. I just started playing Morrowing and this was the first thing I figured out.

There is already an interface mod that (among others, like making fonts smaller and displaying 12 items/page instead of 6) gives you a much larger map (map basically takes the whole screen). Not resizable though.

allow you to drag items out of your inventory without closing the menu

I agree, in fact that's one reason I'm still debating whether to buy it. While you mention some good fixes, the interface feels like it was built for Xbox first and not rebuilt for PC. Compared to the MMOs I've been playing recently it leaves a lot to be desired.My friend's copy also seems to crash to the desktop from time to time. Maybe I'll wait for the patching to start before I tackle the game.

I agree, in fact that's one reason I'm still debating whether to buy it. While you mention some good fixes, the interface feels like it was built for Xbox first and not rebuilt for PC. Compared to the MMOs I've been playing recently it leaves a lot to be desired.

Interface mods are already starting to tackle the issue, quite a lot of people have fond memories of the Morrowind interface and we should get a much better and much more PC-oriented interface in a month or so. Unless Bethesda does it's homeworks

I've logged 36 hours (at least that's the played time on/save), and haven't had a single crash. This includes (probably obviously) 6+ hour sessions. Damn this game is awesome! That said, there are some bugs that need fixing, but nothing like Daggerfall had.

Also, I haven't really noticed the "console" feeling of navigating through menus. I actually would think it'd be very annoying on a console.

The crash problem may be specific to video card or needed updated drivers. Not my computer, so I didn't get a chance to try to fix it. A couple reviews I read noted that crashing to the desktop was a problem - probably specific to particular hardware I think.I guess I'm just used to being able to bring up inventory and map information in windows on the main screen (ala World of Warcraft or Everquest 2). The font size on the interface screen also seems really big (as in for easy viewing on a tv) even though

There is already an interface mod that (among others, like making fonts smaller and displaying 12 items/page instead of 6) gives you a much larger map (map basically takes the whole screen). Not resizable though.

I've seen that particular mod, and it seems sketchy.. It also is an all or nothing deal.

not say 'Loading Area...' every six seconds in huge-ass text

There are already, like, 3 mods for that.

And it kicks ass. Thanks.

Still... Morrowind worked the way you'd expect. You didn't need to know any tricks

Ok, first of all, I dug out the manual and double checked just now because I did read it before, and F1-4 aren't even documented in there. Only F5 and F9. Same goes for most of the other "shortcuts" listed in this thread.Second, yes. I'm suggesting that an immersive game world that austensably contains a built in tutorial should have a user interface that stays out of the way so much that you shouldn't need a manual to figure out how to play it. Other games manage it. Morrowind managed it. So yes. You shoul

Oblivion still has quite a lot of room to improve, and some parts of it are actually worse than Morrowind.

The leve system should've been dropped a long time ago. It doesn't really make sense anyway, just grow the stats from the attributes. And because of the redesign, to get the ability to improve the statistics you need enough to not make the game too hard (especially if you're a magicka-oriented character) you have to make primary skills the skills you will NOT use. That is annoying.

# The leve system should've been dropped a long time ago. It doesn't really make sense anyway, just grow the stats from the attributes. And because of the redesign, to get the ability to improve the statistics you need enough to not make the game too hard (especially if you're a magicka-oriented character) you have to make primary skills the skills you will NOT use. That is annoying.Or not trying to game the system and just follow on with the standard skills you're going to use most as 'majors', then playin

Shift clicking the map puts a marker there. Putting a marker anywhere else removes the previous marker. That's a far cry from leaving notes anywhere you'd like on the map, which you could do in Morrowind with as much text as you'd like so you could read it at any time in the future, and was clearly what the parent poster was talking about.Things like "I've already been in there"...

At least the world in Oblivion is pathetically tiny when compared to Morrowind, so you're less likely to forget a place without

Just in case anyone is interested there are 2 other non-RPG TES games:battlespire [avault.com] Redguard [bethsoft.com]

I stil maintain that daggerfall was the best, barring it's incredibly nasty habit of eating your saved games every 10 minutes or so. I really liked the ability to buy horses with wagons, houses, and boats (I haven't played Oblivion yet so I'm not sure if they brought those features back).

I really liked the ability to buy horses with wagons, houses, and boats (I haven't played Oblivion yet so I'm not sure if they brought those features back).

Horses are back, though without wagons, but the fast travel feature makes them pretty much redundant. Houses are also back, though there are only one or two available to purchase per town (unlike a game like Fable, where you could kill the current owner of a house and it would come on the market and rent it out -- the Oblivion houses are more analog

So ready your horse, grab your finest set of gauntlets, and get the newest super-mega gfx card.The gfx is wonderful, the idea great, the execution of the idea neat, but I'm completely dizzy from riding the horse really fast through the forest during storm at 3 frames per second.

Oblivion is the first time I have played a TES game.
Being someone who loves FPS (hardcore UT and Battlefield player), it takes some thing special for me to play something that doesn't have quad damage and a rocket launcher. I can count the number for non FPSers I own in two hands. A need for speed game that I bought when I got my first car (which I played breifly and haven't touched since) and Oblivion. Having put 30 hours into one character, mostly in 6 hour spurts after work, I am hooked.
Who would have though bows and arrows were as cool as rocket launchers?

Bow and arrows are about as fun as a sniper rifle. Get some kickass spells through spellmaking and these are as fun as rocket launcher.

I'm not sure if in Oblivion you can do it but in MW you could make a ranged wide radius fire damage spell. Kaboom! I love nuclear weapons!:D Beats Redeemer from UT, all BFGs from all Quakes and is -somewhat- comparable to the explosion at the very end of Half-Life 2:)

Doubled over (You're allowed eight effects per spell). I should have called it "Oops" because the only time I cast it (and it took a good few Fortify Magicka potions just to get the mana pool to manage it), I broke the main quest and several faction chains in one blast.

it takes some thing special for me to play something that doesn't have quad damage and a rocket launcher.

Or you could simply find some trick (or simply create a mod using the insanely easy to use content creator) and create a super enchanted weapon that could kill anything in an area the size of a small town in one shot using the in game weapon Enchanting. It was so bad in the previous game, Morrowind, people figured out how to essentially give themselves god mode without leaving town, leveling up or cheat

> Or you could simply find some trick (or simply create a mod using the insanely easy to use content creator) and create a super enchanted weapon that could kill anything in an area the size of a small town in one shot using the in game weapon Enchanting.

I also love the bow and arrow. Just the fact that the arrow takes time to get to the target and falls to the earth as it goes makes aiming really fun. Lead the target and aim high... adds a bit of challenge, which makes hitting a crit shot from the edge of sight radius really special. Now I'm waiting for an FPS that uses bows and arrows.

I've missed daggerfall but have played the others.. is it me or are you always a criminal in the beginning of the game??? I was experiencing some MAJOR deja-vu in the beginning of Oblivion in the dungeon.

(Yeah, Arena was there by design. Daggerfall started with you getting imprisoned too, for a decent tutorial dungeon. With Morrowind they made it a prison ship just for laughts. With Oblivion they decided not to break the tradition.)

In daggerfall, you don't start out as a criminal. You're set on a mission by the emperor, and your boat crashes during a storm. You start the game just waking up from it in Privateer's Cove with your ship destroyed.

Some of those new innovative features attributed to Morrowind actually have their roots in Daggerfall. In particular, vampirism and lycanthropy in Morrowind are based on nearly identical features in Daggerfall. Morrowind is the impressive engineering feat while Daggerfall is the inspirational work of creative genius. Hats off to Daggerfall!

Daggerfall is still the most ambitious of all of their titles. I played through the game, then went back to look at some of the spoilers for it, and... WOW. There's a gajillion things you can do in the game that I hadn't even touched upon. Not only could you become a vampire, but they had 12 different clans of vampires, with different abilities, inter-clan politics. The most detailed character generator yet, which just played up to the powergamer in me (fear of animals flaw FTW). Werewolves. Unique Artifacts. Quests for different religions, guilds, etc. A crazy awesome magic item creation system (My top gear only worked during the full moon, to keep costs low. I spent a lot of time sleeping.)

And I thought that my flying horse was pretty cool.

Sure, they used a "dynamic map" system of pseudo-random generating the dungeons and towns, but you know what? I liked the fact that there was 20,000 dungeons in the world. Every so often, I'd hop down into one for a nice randomly-generated-ala-diablo-2 experience. The sucky part was when you'd get quests to fish items out of the dungeons -- the dungeons were litterally huge, and could take hours to complete sometimes, especially if you couldn't find the one secret door behind the double-hairping corridor turn. So if I was doing quests for the mages guild (which I spent maybe 75% of my game time doing), I'd just drop any dungeon fetch quests and request a new one.

I wish they'd do a "digitally-remastered" version of Daggerfall, kinda similar to what they did with FF1&2 (improved the graphics, added a lil' bit of new content). If it looked as good as Oblivion, I'd never leave my computer.

The trouble with TES games is the fact that Bethesda doesn't believe in that whole whacky "quality assurance" thing. Daggerfall wouldn't run on my computer. Period. Until the 18th patch or so -- had a Cyrix CPU in 1996, remember those? Battlespire was almost a great game (online multiplayer with real working castles, catapults, drawbridges!) but was so buggy I had to stop playing. Redguard wouldn't run for more than 5 minutes without crashing. Morrowind once corrupted a section of the world (forcing a reinstall), and another time ate one of the quest items I needed to complete the game (had to go into the TES Construction set and drop a new one on the ground for me). Oblivion crashes every time I quit (ironically enough), but then also if I alt-tab, hit the windows key, reload too fast, click too fast, hit the keyboard too fast... or basically any time your hard drive can't keep up to speed (I have a Raid0 hard drive, so it rarely happens). It did crashed once on my girlfriend after she'd spent an hour without saving, which is really the only way I got to get my computer back from her after she spent her entire spring break on my own computer playing Oblivion. =) I was relegated to doing work with an old laptop.

Oblivion is great though. Maybe not as big in scope as Daggerfall, but damn. It looks awesome if you have the rig to run it, the quests (and the quest system) are about 100x more interesting than Morrowind's. All in all, it's one of the better RPGs I've played (and I thank the lord it's not an interactive movie like FFVII or FFX), and if the only time it reliably crashes is when I quit... well, I can deal with that.

Absolutely not. No. The most ambitious of their titles is called "The Elder Scrolls:Travels" and it's for your cell phone. It is a "Bard's Tale" style RPG on your cell phone. It doesn't have an immersive plot, but it does have 4 classes, a huge dungeon that I got extremely lost in, and portability that I just can't fight. I had the game for 6 months or so (Yes, you can save the game) before I beat it. It's difficult to find, but it worked on my Sanyo SCP 5200. It was such a great game, I transferred it to m

I actually have Dawnstar on my cell phone, played it for an hour or two while stuck in various places without anything better to do, haven't been particularly impressed by it. What did you like so much about it?

I read in the article that Arena is from 1994, but I know a german computer game "Das Schwarze Auge" (based on a german pen&paper RPG similar to D&D) which had exactly the same principle that you could go wherever you wanted and find little quests etc. and only go for the main quest when you felt like it.Sorry, The Elder Scrolls were not the first (but hey, I'm playing Oblivion right now as much as I can find time... (: ).